- This week the idea of Virtual Communities was discussed and if defined as support groups formed by emotional bonds and experiences similar to those forged by geographically local communities. In Second life the users get the opportunity to travel to different worlds (server locations) in order to chat and move around with other users who may share the same interests. Second life has taken the idea of virtual communities and made so many specific niche areas for certain users to go and enjoy themselves. Second life is a conduit to find a personalized virtual community that each individual user will enjoy being a part of.
- Second life allows users to chat with each other in a free, and open manner. The personal information that is shared here is sometimes surprising. People will not be shy at all to share, what gender, ethnicity, age that they are along with, personal interests and perhaps even physical appearance. Second life like Facebook allows people from all over the world to converse and function together in an open format. The difference being that in Second life users can completely change their avatar to something far different than a fake picture.
- For me I thought it was interesting to be able to change the avatar into so many different categories of life, from animals, people, to cars, and vampires. The variety of avatars combined with the different ways other users clothed them always made it interesting to see who was about to walk around the corner. Additionally I thought it was pretty interesting that users were able to fly around the map regardless of what avatar they selected, so to see cars flying around was quite fascinating.
- In Second life much like Omegle I found it difficult to carry an intellectual conversation, many users I tried to talk to either weren't interested or decided to write ignorant things. The amount of times I actually found an intellectual conversation are far outweighed by number attempts at this type of conversation.
- Second life is very useful when users wish to find a specific world or virtual community that fits their own style, because of this ease of access sometimes the users in the world users teleport to will share similar interests. I think of Second life as a database full of virtual communities for users to find and enjoy, in this aspect I believe that Second life succeeds in communication. On the other-hand because many users disguise their identity behind avatars it is still impossible to have a 100% genuine conversation with other users a problem that is much more difficult to have in person.
- When I went into certain worlds that were highly populated I found that the game began to lag and cause improper functioning. For me I found this highly annoying and immediately teleported to another world to escape the jumpy, slow connection. I found that this issue along with the disguising of avatars really turned me off from ever willingly going back to second life. On an overall basis, Second life succeeds more than it fails at conversations when thinking in terms of virtual communities.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Second Life
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You're totally right that it is surprising what people will share on Second Life. It was hard to have an in-depth conversation with other users. I never engaged in conversations because I was too shocked in what people would say on in the virtual world.
ReplyDeleteYes, It was really interesting with those different kind of categories that you have mentioned, like being able to customize as people, animals,or even vehicles. I think it is also interesting because it allows you to explore different kind of environments to play and enjoy with it. You can also create your own things within Second Life, like games, stories homes, and whatever you want specially when you have a premium account.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it was very difficult to have an intelligent conversation with other users on Second Life. Every time I would try and chat with someone they would either respond with vulgar language or just not respond at all. I also thought that Second life was interesting in the way of customization. The way that users could create an avatar that was either a human, robot, vehicle, vampire, or animal was pretty strange sometimes. Every time I would use a portal to go into a new area I would come across weirder and weirder avatars.
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